For many years, closed captioning technology has allowed hearing impaired individuals to better understand the spoken dialogue of media such as movies and television programs by displaying a text summary or transcription of the dialogue occurring in the media at the bottom the screen on which the media is displayed. In addition to aiding hearing impaired users, closed captioning is also utilized by non-native speakers of a language to better comprehend movies and television programs in that language.
One drawback with conventional closed captioning is that it occludes part of the movie or television program over which it is displayed, which in addition to being aesthetically unappealing, also potentially may interfere with the viewer's comprehension and enjoyment of the visual content of the media. This problem is particularly burdensome to non-native speakers who have sufficient language skill to understand most of the spoken dialog, and thus only occasionally encounter passages that they cannot understand. For these highly proficient non-native speakers, the closed captioning can be an annoyance during the portions of the program that are well understood.
With prior closed captioning technologies, such users have the option of turning closed captioning off, for example, by using a remote control to negotiate an on-screen menu of a playback device and setting closed captioning to OFF. However, after closed captioning is turned off the user may encounter a portion of the program with dialog that cannot be understood by the user. The user is forced to pick up the remote control, stop the program, turn closed captioning ON via the on-screen menu, rewind the program, and hit play again, in order to replay the misunderstood portion of the dialogue. For user viewing broadcast live television without a digital video recorder, even this labored sequence of commands is impossible, since the program cannot be rewound. As can be appreciated, it is awkward and cumbersome for a user to activate and deactivate closed captioning in this manner many times during a single viewing session.